Globalism or America First?

This is a piece by an academic who wrote a book about FDR getting us into the war in Europe.

Republican leaders need to remember what happened the last time America chose to be isolated

She quotes Henry Luce's The American Century in opposition to Trump's America First policy and his hammer blows against American globalism.

Luce published his famous article, "The American Century," in February 1941, seven months after all the European democracies -- except Great Britain -- had surrendered to Hitler's ruthless armies. 

Luce traced this catastrophe to the end of World War I when the Senate rejected Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations and the United States began its retreat from world affairs.

In the 1920s and '30s, Americans embraced "the moral and practical bankruptcy" of isolationism, Luce wrote, and "failed to play their part as a world power." 

That unwillingness to confront Hitler's aggression in the 1930s, he underscored, brought "disastrous consequences" to "all mankind."

All the same, the idea that we should or had to eventually enter the war to keep Hitler from conquering the world is exactly the sort of childish twaddle that it appears, and Luce himself said just that in this very piece.

Even the British, whose regime and empire Hitler vastly admired, could probably have negotiated a separate peace without accepting any degree of nazification.

And Luce in this piece concedes that an American defense of North America against all enemies, if that was what Americans wanted, could well have worked.

Anyway, there was no convincing argument against that notion.

For Luce, the question whether America should send armies to fight in Europe to stop Hitler depended on what Americans wanted to do.

Defend only their own democracy in their own country, or defend and advance "so-called democratic principles" and government throughout the world?

Isolationism or engagement?

In the latter part of his piece, Luce presents a brilliant and sweeping picture of what American internationalism could and should be.

It is, today, a stirring and powerful defense of the kind of international liberal order built up after the Second World War.

But what it really comes down to, today, is whether we continue our engagements in NATO, in the Far East, in Oceania, and elsewhere, along with participation in global institutions like the UN and the WTO and support for pan-European institutions like the EU.

All for the encouragement, construction, and consolidation of a civilization of global democratic capitalism.

Or instead let it - or even make it - all fall apart.

And risk enemies rising up everywhere, surrounding fortress North America and forcing us to risk fighting a war to save ourselves right here in our home turf, rather than far lesser wars, often proxy wars, at a very great distance from ourselves.

PS. Luce in this piece suggests America commit itself to feeding everyone in the world who would otherwise go without, at taxpayer expense, with food produced by American agriculture.

But we have not done it and are very unlikely to.

We won't even feed all our own.